Oh, To Be In England...Now!

'Oh, to be in England now that April's here.' These words have popped into my head from time to time, often - believe it or not - in April. I knew they came from a poem by Robert Browning, but have no memory of how or where I first heard them. At school perhaps, or just in the air, part of  the common talk, usually uttered in a jocular manner. I associated them with lines from stiff-lipped Victorian odes like 'The boy stood on the burning deck' or 'Say not the struggle nought availeth' or 'Play up! Play up! And play the game!' Then I came across the poem in an anthology of English Verse and realised two things. Firstly, it should be 'there' not 'here'. Browning wrote the poem while living in Italy, hence the title and the reference to a 'gaudy melon flower' at the end. Secondly, it is in fact a charming nature poem, full of unusually specific imagery.

This guy knows his stuff, I thought. There's nothing misty-eyed - well, not much - in his vision of nature. He's been a field student, he knows what's going on out there. The elm tree sending up suckers from its roots to surround the main 'bole' (trunk) of the tree; those spring arrivals - the whitethroat and swallow - building their nests a little later than native birds; the song thrush repeating each phrase it sings. And that beautiful image of buttercups as 'the little children's dower' (dowry), evoking one of our childhood connections with nature when we held that rich yellow flower under each other's chin. And to mention the whitethroat! A bird which most 'poetry lovers' have probably never heard of, though it holds over a million breeding territories in the UK. Has the whitethroat ever featured in any other poem?

Field of gold: buttercups in my local park

There are two well-known English poems 'about' thrushes, one by Thomas Hardy, the other by Ted Hughes. To my mind, Hardy overdoes his description both of the winter gloom ('broken', 'haunted', 'corpse', 'crypt', 'death-lament' - we get it) and the bird's song which is 'ecstatic' and 'of joy illimited'. When I hear a song thrush or mistle thrush singing, I find it often thrilling and always uplifting, but that's because of its non-human otherness and because it reaffirms that there is all manner of natural beauty in this world. The Hughes poem takes a different direction. His thrush has a 'dark deadly eye' and is driven by its own needs to 'bounce and stab' and find food, either for itself or its 'nestful of brats'. The writing is brilliant, but it makes a gory banquet out of a thrush digging up a worm from the lawn. 

The 'dark deadly eye' of a thrush, again in my local park

I'm not saying that the Browning poem is better than the Hardy or Hughes, but simply that it should hold a place in any anthology of nature writing. It's neither 'patriotic' nor overly 'sentimental' as I've seen it described on the web, but written with a genuine understanding of nature and free of any motive other than appreciation. The problem is, people are often 'unaware', as Browning puts it in the first stanza, of what is actually happening in the natural world beyond the stuff that's in their faces - the sun shining, the birds singing, the trees blossoming. There is a clip on You Tube which illustrates what I mean. Geoffrey Palmer reads 'Home-Thoughts' beautifully, but accompanied by a series of images almost entirely unconnected with the words of the poem. A field of mud is not quite the same as a field 'rough with hoary dew'!